How COVID-19 Has Impacted Clinical Trials

Social distancing. Country-wide lockdowns. Mask mandates. In the last year, people around the world have been forced to adapt their everyday lives to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 – and the clinical trial community is no exception. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a variety of challenges and limitations for trial managers. Many contract research organizations temporarily paused and/or adapted the processes of ongoing clinical trials to ensure patient safety and comply with governmental regulations. In some cases, those adapted processes have accelerated operations to allow for the rapid implementation of COVID-19 clinical trials. In many cases, the new processes include testing study subjects for COVID-19 before enrollment. What are some of the other ways that clinical trial teams have modified clinical trial management since the advent of the pandemic? Will these alterations influence the future of clinical research?